A whistleblower has told how he was forced out of a senior post at the NHS
watchdog after reporting the findings of its inspections.

Roger Davidson lost his job as head of media and public affairs for the Care Quality Commission just before the 2010 general election — after telling how a quarter of NHS trusts had failed to meet basic hygiene standards.

He was forced to sign a gagging order when he left and was told that the CQC was “railing against” his action to “highlight issues”.

It had previously stopped telling the public how to find reports on infections in their local hospitals to limit publicity damaging to the NHS, he said.

The disclosure is the latest blow to the CQC. It comes after former managers, including Cynthia Bower, the chief executive, were accused of orchestrating a “cover-up”.

Evidence of its failure to prevent a scandal at a hospital maternity unit in Furness, Cumbria, at which 16 babies died, was destroyed.

Mr Davidson’s testimony, now made public, was part of thousands of hours of evidence heard under oath by the Francis inquiry into how up to 1,200 patients came to die needlessly at Mid Staffordshire trust.

It forms part of a tranche of documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph which detail a regulator apparently intent on suppressing negative publicity about the NHS, amid political pressure from then Labour ministers and their advisers before the election.

Other documents include a letter from Andy Burnham, then health secretary and now Labour’s shadow health spokesman, telling the health care regulator in November 2009 that its role was to “restore public confidence in the NHS”.

Another document shows how Mr Burnham’s special adviser said she was “frankly disgusted” by television coverage exposing a hospital scandal before ministers were briefed on it.

Mr Burnham on Saturday faced growing questions over his performance as health secretary.

A Conservative MP whose constituents use the Furness hospital wrote to him to ask if he put political pressure on the CQC to prevent it criticising the NHS.

At the time Labour was keen to fight off Conservative attacks on its handling of the health service.

Mr Davidson said he had experienced how the watchdog caved in to pressure to limit negative publicity about the health service. “The message that 'we don’t want bad news’ infected the whole organisation,” he said. “There was no compass.”

The CQC was set up by Labour, with the official merger of several regulators in 2009, though it operated in shadow form for a year before that.

In evidence given under oath to the Francis inquiry, Mr Davidson said it was made clear to him when the CQC began work that the organisation should not “make too much noise” about problems in the NHS.

He described incidents in which Labour ministers and their spin doctors expressed anger when the CQC and its predecessor, the Healthcare Commission (HCC), published reports painting the service in a negative light.

“It was made very clear to us from the outset by Baroness Young, the chair, that the CQC would be a different animal from the HCC,” he said.

“The HCC was deemed to have made too much noise in the media and it became clear that the same kind of publicity would not be welcomed by the CQC.”

After a shocking report in 2007 about hundreds of deaths in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells Hospital Trust, special advisers to Labour ministers briefed newspapers that Alan Johnson, then health secretary, was angry and accused the HCC of “standing by while people died”, he said.

Mr Davidson said he believed the comments were a way of “deflecting the blame from the government”.

When a damning report by the CQC about failings at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals Foundation Trust was published in November 2009, Mr Burnham, then health secretary, wrote to the chairman, then Baroness Young, a Labour peer, suggesting that the true role of the regulator was to “restore patient confidence” in the NHS.

On the day of publication, his special adviser, Katie Myler, wrote to Mr Davidson saying she was “disgusted” to see the story on television news before the CQC had briefed ministers about it.

Mr Davidson said that although the trust had been warned in May that year that inspectors were concerned at what they had found, the CQC was “reluctant” to publish the findings and was in “a state of indecision” for months.

Mr Davidson describes in the evidence a “clear strategic choice” taken by the CQC’s leadership team, to “make it harder for the media to report negative news about the NHS”.

He said it reached decisions to stop telling the public about the existence of reports of inspections on hospital infections and abolished its central investigation team, which uncovered the Mid Staffordshire scandal.

Both were attempts to reduce national publicity about NHS failure, he said.

The pressure cost him his job when he briefed a newspaper about the findings of the CQC’s first inspections, which showed a quarter of hospitals failing on hygiene, he said.

The briefing was agreed by the executive team, which included his immediate boss Jill Finney, he said. She was accused last week of ordering the destruction of a report that uncovered weaknesses in its inspections, which may have cost the lives of mothers and babies at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.

The team also included Ms Bower, then CQC chief executive, accused of being party to the same decision, in a report by Grant Thornton management consultants last week.

But when the story was published in April 2010, a month before the general election, it was more high-profile than executives had expected and Mr Davidson was immediately suspended, accused of “a breakdown of trust”.

He said he was never told why executives had suspended him but he suspected “that there were conversations between the CQC and ministers to the effect that the CQC would not cause any trouble in the run-up to purdah.” Purdah is the period during an election campaign when the Civil Service avoids publishing reports.

Mr Davidson said it was made clear to him that although he would have a solid case for unfair dismissal, he would have to “do a deal and walk away” to minimise publicity.

He said Miss Finney told him on his departure that he “had a different philosophy in that I was seeking to highlight issues and the organisation was railing against this”.

Because Mr Davidson was subject to a gagging order, the evidence about the culture presided over by Ms Bower and Miss Finney only emerged when he was subject to a subpoena by the public inquiry.

When contacted Mr Davidson, now director of communications for NHS England, would only say: “I felt I was sticking up for the public and for transparency and I know I did the right things.

“There are all sorts of pressures pulling a regulator. A robust regulator should say, 'We are here for the truth, and nothing else’ — and they weren’t up to that.”

David Morris, the Conservative MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, wrote an open letter to Mr Burnham on Saturday asking him what pressure was put on the CQC to “tone down” criticism of hospitals in the run-up to the 2010 election. A spokesman for the CQC said the organisation was now committed to exposing poor care and was strengthening its inspection regime.

Miss Finney has denied ordering the deletion of the internal review relating to Morecambe Bay and said she informed the Grant Thornton review team of the existence of the report.

Baroness Young said the account “misrepresented” her position and that while she served at the CQC, until December 2009, she had been committed to “transparency”.

Mr Burnham insists that he wanted the CQC to act more robustly to maintain confidence in the NHS.

“The very next week, I asked for an in-depth look to be taken at all hospitals and that is why more than 20 were registered with conditions on them so they could be monitored more closely,” he said.

Mr Burnham said ministers did not put pressure on the CQC to tone down any criticism of hospitals.

“We did the precise opposite of what is being claimed,” he said. “What we wanted was for CQC to expose problems at hospitals and flush out the poor ones.”